“A little far from home, aren’t you?”
Kratos most certainly is! One of the biggest anti-heroes in the PlayStation family has moved home twice in the past four years. First, Kratos left the ancient Greek climes and mythology behind and hit the colder and harsher environment of the Nordic mythology. But by far the bigger move, though, is that he’s no longer a PlayStation-exclusive character, with PC players now invited into the fold ahead of the PS4 & PS5 release of the concluding chapter in this tale, God of War Ragnarok. The question left to be answered is: Is Kratos sorry or is he better?
It is fair to say that PlayStation Studios has been at the forefront of gaming technology and quality for the past couple of generations. This is borne out by one of the longest-serving studios, Sony Santa Monica, exploding onto the PS4 with arguably the game of the entire generation. Even though it may be four years old now, God of War is still a gorgeous looking game. With exceptionally high production values, incredible art direction, strong visual and technical implementation, and memorable and complex characters with a compelling story throughout, it really reinvigorated the plot-driven, single-player aspect of games whilst expanding on a pre-established character and lore with confidence and honesty. Name me a game that has a better opening 30 minutes than this? It sets the tone so well that I found it almost impossible to stop playing. The 2022 PC version loses none of that and is as excellent as the 2018 PS4 game, which – if you haven’t already read the IGN review of, now’s your chance.
God of War PC Features
Check out the God of War PC system requirements.
So, what does this PC version offer other than, as the box states, “a refined and updated PC port of the PS4/Pro version?” With some minor but welcome additions, from a content perspective this is no different, but the visual makeup has made some leaps to leverage the spectrum of hardware available on PCs. Here are the big-ticket upgrades:
Full pixel-pumping 4K is now available without the “checkerboarded 4K” God of War shipped with on PS4 Pro (and on the PS5 backward-compatible version, which only unlocked the framerate). AMD and Nvidia offer DLSS super sampling and AMD’s open-source Fidelity FX Super Resolution (also known as FSR). Both run on Nvidia RTX cards but only FSR is available on AMD cards. These both offer an improvement on image quality by rendering at a lower resolution and intelligently upscaling for an image that looks nearly as good as native 4K. In the case of DLSS, Nvidia is reconstructing the image using temporal data from previous pixels/frames, while FSR is a technique that performs a spatial upscale and then a contrast-aware dynamic sharpening pass. Both can still achieve excellent results on cheaper hardware. A nice touch here is that in the graphics options menu, God of War shows you the resolution being rendered by the engine and then the output target to the screen. This means you move through the same resolution levels, predominantly, across both technologies.
DLSS starts at 1280x720 with Ultra performance, and that is one rung lower than FSR, which starts at performance, but both target 1920x1080 base outputs. Then we move to Balanced, then Quality, and finally Ultra-Quality which is available for FSR only.
All in all, DLSS offers the better image quality when you zoom in, and it really works best at Performance levels. With FSR, upscaling from that low input resolution is just not up to 4K levels. Once you get to Quality mode, however, the visual differences are much harder to notice even with close inspection, but FSR is 8% to 10% more performant on average in like-for-like sections using the same hardware. Having the choice of either method is the best part, but either way both AMD and Nvidia players will gain more performance out of their respective cards, and the implementation here is solid.
There is 21:9 ultra-widescreen support if you have such a monitor, allowing you to revel in God of War’s beautiful vistas. That’s a welcome sight at many points as it improves on the incredible sense of scale, which has been a key element of the series since its PS2 origins in 2005. This excellent shot here shows the World Serpent as it pulls back and the birds fly past for greater scale; it’s a good example of the impact this extended mode can have.
Next we come to framerates, which can be capped at up to 120fps if you have the hardware to run it, and then graphical option changes accompanying this. One great feature of PlayStation releases on PC is how you can set them to an “original mode” in the menu that matches all settings exactly to the PS4/Pro version. Beyond this, we have two more options, High and then Ultra, as well as an Ultra+ setting for reflections which provides higher resolution and range for the SSR reflections. The Ultra textures option boosts higher MIPs on more surfaces within the frame and a mild boost in texture clarity over the PS4 Pro/PS5 version, meaning most textures look the same or marginally sharper. As does the anisotropic filtering (AF) option, which can again help texture clarity at oblique angles, which in some scenes can offer a 4% improvement to performance from the lowest to Ultra (though for most mid-range cards High or Ultra should be fine).
Model Quality bumps up the level of detail on trees and foliage, as well as the number of polygons for rocks and other objects near the camera. The bump from Original to High can be clearly seen in longer views, but the jump from there to Ultra is much harder to spot. Reflections do help on certain surfaces, with sharper and more visible details noticed, but they are still SSR in nature, so they draw out and have the same artifact level as PS4/Pro.
The two biggest improvements, in my view, are shadows and ambient occlusion (AO), with the higher amount of foliage being drawn now meaning that, at Ultra settings, you not only get sharper more detailed shadows, but also more shadow-casting objects. This adds more depth and contrast to scenes, and allows Kratos and other characters to be bathed in more light and shade. Boosting this further is the bump up to what’s called “ground-truth” AO, or screen space directional occlusion, which again just embeds details into the scene much better.